Getting there

Here's why I don't get along with cars.

They're unpredictable. Drive over a couple of curbs and you end up with a flat tire. If you are lucky enough to have gallant help at hand, who'll quickly roll up their sleeves and discover all kinds of tools for changing a tire (and a spare tire) in the boot of your car, which you weren't even aware you had been provided with, you can get away with watching them change the wheel in the biting cold, comfortably snug in your jacket, making a great show of trying to get through to rental helpline on your phone. However, you still won't be spared a 45 minutes long drive to the airport (all the while desperately worried about the smaller temporary tire) to get your car exchanged.

They're temperamental. Leave your headlights on when parking in the morning and your car will refuse to start when you get back in the evening. You'll have to call help to coax your dead battery alive by jumpstarting it. Obviously it'll have to rain on that day so that you freeze while you're hunting for your car and wondering why the car you're almost sure is your car isn't responding to the key remote.

They're demanding. You have to equip them with GPSs so that they'll take you to places. Occasionally wrestle for an hour with an ice-scraper while you clean their windows and wind shields of ice and snow after they've been standing in the snow for a day.

They have a weird sense of humor. Leave them alone in the parking lot while you go and eat in a restaurant 0.2 miles away and they are nowhere to be found when you get back. You'll spend an hour looking for them everywhere and just when you've given up and made a fool of yourself by calling up people to tell them you've lost your car and you need to be rescued, they'll suddenly appear out of thin air.

They play hard to get. Try looking for a second hand car to buy and you realize how many issues they have. And they're difficult to understand. Some people are known to take a long time to get comfortable with driving them.

As you can see my relationship with cars isn't going all that well. I'm onto my second rental already which I'm hoping will survive until I get my own car, and am also keeping my fingers crossed that it'll work out better that third time.

Taggicted

So as Priyanka suggested, I've decided to create a book tag, which very likely will run through three people. Since I'm the creator and also the first responder, I intend to create this tag with fewer questions and do away with strong adjectives like most, favorite, best, adore, hate, since they will making deciding between books so much more difficult.


Two books you like (and preferably also state why)

1. A Suitable Boy.
Its a huge huge book and I did find it to drag in places, but I think I managed to read it in pretty good time. Its the first Vikram Seth I read and I enjoyed the way he seems to like all his characters. I also liked the unembarassed Indian-ness of the book.

2. Pride and prejudice.
I can imagine people going 'Bleh' on reading his. I've read and re-read this book quite a few times. I don't like Mister Darcy, I think Elizabeth Bennet is not so smart either, the other characters are nuts, but I still like the book. Must be the same reason I watch all romantic comedies although I never fail to find them dumb and trite later.


Two books you've read which you think are unusual for some reason.

1. The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth, because its all in verse and yet it doesn't get tiresome.

2. Angela's Ashes, because nothing nice ever happens to Frank McCourt and yet the book is strangely not depressing.


Two authors you like

1. Vikram Seth.
I've read three books by him so far and I've liked them all.

2. George R R Martin.
I'm quite sold on his Song of Fire and Ice series. He creates elaborate characters and kills them off in a jiffy. I was wondering in the middle of the first book if there'll be any characters left for the series to continue. Lots more have died since.


Two books you don't like so much

1. Bourne Identity.
I honestly tried. I couldn't read it.

2. Pollyanna.
I usually like all these feel-good books like Heidi, Anne of green gables etc., but Pollyanna was a little too much sweetness.


Two books you own and are fond of

1. The Secret Garden.
Its one of my childhood favorites. I got it as a birthday present. Its tattered and moth-eaten now, but I still treasure it (I don't take good care of it though, apparently).

2. Great Expectations.
It was a prize I won in school. I found it tiresome to read at first, but have read it multiple times since.


Two books you'd like to buy

1. Two Lives
The new autobiographical book by Vikram Seth. Its only available in hardcover right now and costs quite a bit.

2. The complete Calvin and Hobbes set.
Costs a whole lot again, and I'm not patient enough to collect them one by one (Actually each one costs quite a bit as well).


So I'll pass on the tag to Histrionix and Kray, and that completes my 3 people set.

Tagged

Since Kray tagged me, I have to answer all kinds of shady questions. There are some advantages to this though. For one it makes for an effortless blog. Besides I never really do self-analysis of this kind. I know some very vague things about myself, but if someone was to ask me, whats my favorite movie and who's my favorite actor and such stuff, I'll have a tough time answering.

Anyways so here goes

Seven things I would like to do before I die (not in any order)

1. Own a dog. The type of dog keeps changing from time to time, but its going to be a big, furry dog.

2. Travel through Europe (not one of those organized tours).

3. Get married and have babies. One atleast should be a girl.

4. Fly a plane (I'm figuring out how to drive a car currently).

5. Have something to do with literature apart from reading it, maybe write a book, or just become a publisher, or start a magazine or something.

6. Learn how to swim.

7. Try out something like bungee-jumping/sky-diving, although I'll need somebody to force me to do it.


Seven things I can do

1. Get jokes, am usually quick at that.

2. Understand what people are feeling, am usually fairly perceptive. I might not always hang around to listen to them, but I sympathize.

3. Spend a whole day all by myself (with books and a TV at my disposal) quite contentedly (more than one day get tough).

4. Be a good listener (if and when I feel like it).

5. Be loyal (or rather that I usually am loyal to people and things I like, and not easily swayed).

6. Write long pointless mails to people. This is a newly acquired skill, not too long back the max length of my mails used to vary from 5-10 sentences.

7. Always find time to do the things I want to do. Its possibly because I do fewer things, but I've noticed that I can always create as much free time as I want to.


Seven things I cannot do

.. this should be quite easy

1. Find my way to any place, follow maps, differentiate between left and right.

2. Fake niceness/interest/enjoyment or lie. If I do it, I do it with great difficulty.

3. Make up my mind about anything.

4. Take the initiative in getting to know people.

5. Read Frederick Forsyth.

6. Write neatly.

7. Be patient.


Seven things I say the most (Not in any order)

1. Hmm/Hmph

2. I guess

3. Thank You

4. Cool/Nice

5. Anyways

6. Basically

7. Yeah


Seven things that attract me to the opposite sex. (Not in any order)

1. Bright eyes.

2. Short thick hair.

3. Smile or rather the grin.

4. Idealism.

5. Genuine-ness (is that a word?).

6. Attentiveness, when shown towards me.

7. Intelligence, sense of humor.


Seven celebrity crushes (not necessarily current crushes and again in no order)

1. Sachin Tendulkar (of the days past).

2. Rahul Dravid for his idealism.

3. Tom Hanks for the charm and magnetism.

4. George Clooney for the smile (and the hands).

5. Hugh Grant for the accent and the sense of humor.

6. Amir Khan (when I was growing up).

7. Rupert Everett for the voice.


Hm, after the first 2 questions, it was relatively peaceful, and not as bad as I expected. Kray was right, I am extremely lukkha.
I'll tag Histrionix next. Have fun (muhahahaha!)

Touchy, aren't we.

So for a while because of various reasons, I've been pondering over a question - How much sarcasm is humorous, and when does it start getting caustic and simply cruel. I guess it varies from person to person. Some people, its said, have a lower tolerance for sarcastic humor than others. It also depends on who's being sarcastic, if you are expecting somebody to be nice to you, sarcasm coming from them cuts a lot deeper. I tend to be fairly sarcastic myself, I do try to stay on the nice side of sarcastic humor though, especially if its addressed directly to somebody. However, the person concerned may not always think so kindly of the humor, when the joke is on them. In such situations I end up feeling quite guilty eventually. I'm not all that comfortable with excessive sarcasm myself, if it is directed towards me. Double standards?

Histrionix was talking about wish-lists, and I commented on that saying that I can't come up with one for myself. Here's an update - I have a number one wish right now. I want to be able to drive well, and soon. Its such a necessity here! I had been informed that it'll be like this, but I wish the point had been driven home with a lot more stress. I might even have re-considered my job choice.

Coming back to sarcastic humor, I just spent a whole weekend teasing some friends about their new relationships. It was a whole lot of fun, but I hope they still love me.
Before I started typing this blog, I googled for poems on sarcasm, these two seem to fit the theme :D


Caught in the Undertow

Colin, worshipping some frail,
By self-deception sways her:
Calls himself unworthy male,
Hardly even fit to praise her.

But this tactic insincere
In the upshot greatly grieves him
When he finds the lovely dear
Quite implicitly believes him.

-- Christopher Morley


Unfortunate Coincidence

By the time you swear you're his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying -
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.

-- Dorothy Parker

Here today, Gone ... (?)

I've been in US for about a week now and I think I should be writing something about that. Sadly though, I don't really have any big insights or observations to mention about leaving the country, coming to a new one or problems of a 'legal alien entitled to work'; so I'll just have to do with some riff-raff.

My first observation about a foreign country, made from an airborne view of the city of Milan (which is all I saw of it, apart from its airport), was that everything was amazingly geometrical. Fields were perfect rectangles, houses made neat patterns, roads either ran in a straight line or curved in perfect circles or arcs, all in sharp contrast to the chaos of any Indian landscape. The next thing which struck me, once I got to US, was the huge amount of space everywhere - in cars, on roads, besides the roads, in houses, everything is big and roomy. Even the vegetables are supersize! I've been lucky in that I've had a fairly smooth transition so far, I guess its an advantage of working - the company pays for everything. There are also lots of very nice and helpful people around, infact all the people I've come across so far are just extremely polite, and punctual!

Another highlight of the one week here so far has been the trip to DC and the sighting of a giant panda in the national park there. There wasn't really anything very exciting about it, since the pandas were just lazily walking around and they weren't even pristine white as I imagined them (their behinds, which were all I got to see, had become a muddy brown from sitting on their bums all the time), but I'm just glad I got to see a panda. I also saw a giraffe which had to stoop with great difficulty everytime to eat, because for some weird reason all the trees in its enclosure, tall enough for it to reach comfortably, had been fenced in. I think I must've been less than 10 years old, the last time I went to a zoo in India. Of more grown-up interest was the jewellery display in the Natural History Museum. I'm not much of a jewellery person, but I could tell that those were some fine pieces.

I haven't been able to read much since I got here. I did borrow a book by Kurt Vonnegut and it seems to be the more common type of science fiction, in contrast to the other books by him I've read so far. Its one of his earlier books I think. Hopefully, will finish it this weekend and move on to something else.

January 2003 - October 2005

In fond memory of Jabberwocky, the best of computers and the most faithful of companions (whenever he was working properly atleast).

Jabber was a full-time member of the IITB LAN for the greatest part of his life, and it can be safely said - he liked it there. Many were the movies and sitcoms he downloaded and then selflessly played for others' entertainment. In what spare time he had left, he uncomplainingly made himself available for surfing the net, checking mails and so on. He occasionally dabbled in academic work as well, but any major cut-down in his regular entertainment diet, unfortunately, did not agree with his constitution. Pressure of work in Feb-March 2005 led to a stroke (read motherboard fault), and though the transplant operation was successful, Jabber never fully recovered. The stress of maintaining dual Windows and Linux personalities also started showing around this time, leading to further complications.

A complete removal from the nurturing IITB network in May 2005, eventually proved to be fatal. After struggling on for a few months in the heat and power fluctuations of Kota, Jabber finally succumbed to a total hard-disk crash on October 4, 2005 (the wuss that he was!). May he rest in peace (the crashed hard-disk atleast).

I miss you already!

I'm blogging after some 3 weeks I think. Been fairly occupied with all sorts of things in this time and then ofcourse there was the lack of constant and free net access later. So I was on campus for about a week, met people, watched movies, and left wondering (not for the first time) how swiftly days go by in that place. Was still more amazed at how familiar everything was and yet not the same. It wasn't home anymore, not the way it had been for the last 4 years. Each time I entered the corridoor of my ex-wing I tried to recapture that old feeling of homecoming, in vain. I was well aware all the time that this was my last visit of some length to the place in a long while. Bye Bye IITB.

I came across the term 'graphomania' which means a mania for writing books in 'The book of laughter and forgetting' by Milan Kundera. According to the author - "Graphomania is
not a desire to write letters, personal diaries, or family chronicles,.. but a desire to write books (to have a public of unknown readers)...
Graphomania inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions -
(1) an elevated level of general well-being which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities;
(2) a high degree of social automization and, as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals;
(3) the absence of dramatic social changes in the nation's social life."

What I was wondering about is - Is blogging a form of graphomania?

Was talking to a friend the other day, who recently visited Kota after some 4 years, and she was saying how the place has hardly changed in all this time. Inspite of consciously trying she was able to spot only one change, a new flyover, which after an unusually short flyover gestation period of 3 years, is now complete and open to traffic. I had one more change to add to the list- there are no crocodiles in Chambal Garden anymore. They had to be released into the river because the shallow, murky water of the croc pond was bad for them. Good for the crocs, sad for Chambal Garden.

Morning walks are bad for skin

While everybody was talking about sunsets and I was talking about Wodehouse, I was reminded of his poem Caliban at Sunset. Not that I have anything against sunsets. They can be really beautiful and infact I kind of specialize in painting them (in five strokes with a size 10 brush. Very helpful when you have your painting homework submission in another 30 minutes), although mine tend to come out bright orange and red with the sky looking distinctly angry. Must be the red fixation or all the hidden existential angst. Some people might say that those are the only two colors I bother mixing (apart from the blue for the water ofcourse), I'd go with the existential angst however.

Coming back to the poem, I like funny, witty poetry best. The shorter the better as well. If its too long, I often don't get to the end of the poem only. Haikus are good that ways, for example you definitely can't complain about length here (which happens to be a double dactyl actually as Lakesidey pointed out).

Higgledy-piggledy
Ludwig van Beethoven
Bored by requests for some
Music to hum,

Finally answered with
Oversimplicity
"Here's my Fifth Symphony:
Duh, duh, duh, DUM!"

-- E William Seaman.

I do like other kinds of poetry. Its just that I think that usually there's enough sadness in life anyways to be generated internally, so one should take external doses a little sparingly.

So much traffic! I had to walk some 3 kms today in the morning, wading through all the vehicle fumes, to get an auto to work since no auto wallah was ready to drive through the traffic-jam on airport road. Hopefully now that the flyover construction has been resumed, once its over the traffic situation on airport road should ease a bit. Meanwhile I rejoice at my whim which made me splurge on buying shoes which I didn't really need at that point of time.

I came across an extremely talkative auto driver, Murti, yesterday. He asked me the time somewhere in the middle of the drive (later on he explained that if I hadn't answered him then he would've insisted on my getting off his auto), and then once satisfied that I didn't mind him talking, spoke non-stop for the rest of the journey. It was a little difficult to understand everything he said since his Hindi wasn't very good and I couldn't ask him to repeat himself very often since he would turn around, away from the road, to patiently explain what he was saying. He assured me (every 5 minutes) that every woman who sat in his auto was his sister and even if Aishwarya Rai was to come and sit in his auto, he would treat her like a sister. I received some friendly advise that I shouldn't spend too much in Bangalore, should save everything and take it back home. When I was getting off his auto, he shook hands and told me how he had met a new sister today and then promptly asked me to give him ten rupees extra.

Red no more

I shift again tomorrow, the third time and to the fourth place in all, in less than two months in Bangalore. The fact that I've had only a couple of bags to cart around has been a blessing in all this shifting, although I've accumulated more and more stuff gradually and so I'm glad that there'll be no more moving-in/moving-out during what's left of my stay here. Why all this shifting has been happening is quite a story in itself, I'm not sure however if it would make for a thrilling narration, so I'll let it pass.
Bags remind me of why I have two white dresses for convocation now. The original white kurta ended up sporting big green splotches of color after my bag got completely soaked during Delhi-Bangalore flight and had to be substituted by the second white kurta. I couldn't help wondering whether Deccan airways straps passengers' luggage on top of the plane for it to have got so miserably wet.

I think I should invite congratulations for having successfully stuck to my resolve of not buying anything in red.. so far. This resolve stemmed from the realization a few months back that practically everything I had bought lately was some shade of red, and since then I've been consciously avoiding shopping in red. This weekend I walked into a store because their entire display consisted of red and white combinations and walked out with pink and purple shirts. Beat that for self-control!

As I was saying (to different people at different times), I have been reading a lot of Wodehouse lately. You can pick up two Wodehouses for 90 bucks from the road-side book-sellers, they might even reduce the price further I guess if someone bargained well, and I've collected six so far. For some reason I can never remember which Wodehouse I've read and which I haven't, especially the short stories collections. It might be because the names are usually along the lines of Carry on, Jeeves, Thank you, Jeeves, Very Good, Jeeves, which don't really give much clue towards the insides of the book. So I found it useful that someone who holds this opinion has taken the trouble to compile a list to enable others to refresh their Wodehouse memory.

How I was feeling horrible and decided to take a break

I wish I had something to write about, I really do. I have all this time on my hands, its been quite some time since I made an entry here and I really can't think of anything else to do right now sitting here. All perfectly good reasons to be updating blog.
The reason I have nothing to write about is because life has been pretty much a routine lately. I come in for work, I do whatever till about 6-6:30 PM, and then I go back home, I eat, read and then go off to sleep. All weekdays follow this pattern. Weekends afford some diversion, which is why I usually end up writing something after a weekend. All this routine and a combination of some other things ended up leaving me quite unsettled, unhappy yesterday. So I took off from work early, went roaming around for a bit, bought some stuff, and hence am in a much better frame of mind today.

And I came across this today :). Had Mrs Morris cared to speak to me yesterday, I might've come up with an answer along the same lines.

What I Told Mrs. Morris When She Asked How I Was Feeling Today

Grumbly, grouchy,
crabby, grumpy,
sleepy, slouchy,
fussy, frumpy,
whiny, weary,
cranky, crazy,
dingy, dreary,
languid, lazy,
dizzy, drowsy,
cruddy, crummy,
loony, lousy,
scruffy, scummy,
bleary, batty
scraggly, sketchy,
rusty, ratty,
testy, techy.
That describes it,
Mrs. Morris.
Thank you for the
new thesaurus.

--Kenn Nesbitt

Big City Small City

I crossed over yesterday and became a true Banglorean (as in the young, come here for a job sort) in spirit, atleast temporarily. After all that I crib about everybody in Bangalore heading towards Forum/Brigade Road-MG Road on weekends, I did exactly that yesterday and both in the same day as well. Spent the morning watching two movies at PVR (the Forum multiplex). Mangal Pandey was very disappointing, not that I had gone with very high expectations, but still it doesn't say much for a movie if you spent most of the first half waiting for the intermission, and the second wondering how much longer before the movie ends. The songs in the movie are especially useless and the women have absolutely nothing to do, so they could have easily got rid of both and made a shorter, much less painful mangal pandey, or so I think. Madagascar, the second movie I saw, was a nice change after this. Its not absolutely wonderful but good fun nevertheless and its just one and a half hours long which is always good.
The brigade road trip was for meeting up with some batchmates. Most of them didn't show up so the few of us who were there trooped off into a restaurant, ate, and came back.

Some of my earliest reading consisted of Russian folk-tales. There was a big book of those with one of my cousins whom we used to visit in summer vacations and I absolutely coveted it. Almost all the stories had a witch called Baba Yaga who lived in a hut which stood in the middle of the forest on chicken legs. Having legs the hut could move around and the door would turn away whenever you tried to enter it, so it used to be a tricky bit for the hero to figure out how to enter the hut during his quest to rescue the princess. There also used to be a self-unraveling ball of wool in many stories which the hero would take along, I don't remember the context there entirely though.

Russian book fairs used to be a big highlight (for me) of the Dussehra Mela in Kota as well, which incidentally was one of the things Kota was famous for prior to the coaching boom. The effigies of Ravan and his brothers in the Kota Dussehra Mela were amongst the tallest in the country and the fair itself went on for some 15 days. Much household shopping used to happen during the fair especially buying bed-sheets for some reason. And ofcourse there was the mandatory visit to the softy stalls. I use past tense here because I have no idea about the state of affairs for the past four years. Its probably still all the same although I wonder if it still holds the same importance in the small town life of Kota.

Gothic Romances. (With a side-dish of shoes and garnished with dolphins)

I'm reading one currently - Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Infact the introduction to this book is where I came across the term Gothic Romance and now I find the concept quite amusing. It seems to be quite an easy recipe -
Put one very prone to fainting and hysterics (Hehe I remember in the book 'Secret Garden' when Mary hears the term hysterics she finds it very interesting and decides to have some herself when the opportunity arose) woman in a large gloomy castle in an extremely cold and windy place. Introduce an equally gloomy, 'not so conventionally handsome but having a square jaw and a harsh set of features that set him apart in the crowd' hero in the castle. Make everybody slightly psychotic and generally talk as if the world is coming to an end, and when not talking mope around all over the place. Add super-natural elements to taste and you should have a gothic romance on your hands. Oh the hysterical woman will first have to be scared of the hero and then fall in love with him when she discovers how wonderful he actually is.

I'm in love with my new shoes currently. I bought them this weekend and now I think they are the most wonderful thing in the world. I keep stealing a glance at them from time to time. Maybe I should describe them a little to help you understand them better. Well, they are blue and white (I bought blue socks as well to go with them), with white laces and big blue plastic nike arrows on the side. Actually I don't like the plastic arrows so much and they are kind of redundant as well since there already is a much more tasteful, smaller blue arrow at the back. But then I guess that one isn't so visible and that defeats its purpose. Ok so the visible part of the sole is white and there are some white wave like leather patterns on the sides. A grey leather pattern forms an outline of the white leather pattern. Oh there's another nike arrow on the leather pattern just above the laces. And now I don't like that leather pattern so much! Hmph. There's nothing like analyzing to dampen new-found love I guess. Anyways the shoes are still the most comfortable footwear I have currently so their rating shouldn't go down much more for sometime.

Kray wrote about dolphins in his blog. Kray you should make friends with a dolphin. Then you can ride it around whenever u feel like getting off the ship for a while or you could just talk to it while standing on the deck of your ship. Oh and do write about penguins if you see any!

Nothing much to say

Sad that all the blogs I was used to checking on a regular basis are no longer being updated. For that matter I had pretty much forgotten abt my blog itself last few days. Firstly I was away for the weekend for a white water rafting trip (it turned out to be mostly some peaceful boating in a placid river, I didn't even fall off the raft, yay!!) and then once the week started I decided to stop slacking off and do some work.

Anyways if you sit in front of a comp all day long, you have to find ways to entertain yourself. I've tried reading e-books but I normally get too pained after a while. My latest fad is reading journal comics archives. Some of them are atually quite well-drawn and funny to read. Nice way to kill some time on the net. An interesting way to blog also this i.e. in the form of a comic. Its a little too much effort though (and time consuming) and ofcourse u need to be able to draw, although that is not necessarily a pre-requsite. I wish someone I know would start a journal comic, it should be fun keeping track of it.

TTM Revisited

So I finally finished reading The Three Musketeers yesterday. Interesting book, although I started loosing patience a little towards the end and skipped a few pages, actually I skipped the entire made up story the evil woman tells the Felton fellow to convince him of her innocence. I had read a highly abridged version of this book long long time back, and the only bit I remembered from that was when they overhear the cardinal's conversation with Milady through the chimney pipe, so I was very happy when I came to that.

One thing I was wondering about, since my history is not all that upto the mark - Is the queen Anne in the book the Anne of the 'Let them eat cakes if they don't have bread' fame who was the cause of French revolution? Don't know why I started wondering about this in the first place. I think its because I was watching something on the History Channel about the French Revolution where they were talking about the frivolous queen, Anne of Austria, whom everybody in France hated, and the queen Anne in TTM is also Austrian.

Just found this somewhere online -But when it came to Anne of Austria—“our Spanish queen”—his (some Historian's) vituperation knew no bounds. He depicted her as weak, narrow-minded, ignorant, fat, lazy, and vain; accused her of adultery; and claimed that Cardinal Mazarin, “that Italian clown,” was the true father of her second son.
Well the Anne in the book is supposed to be extremely beautiful and the Cardinal hates her guts. However she is the wife of Louis XIII. Now I wonder if the Duke of Buckingham was real. Nevermind.

Condensed Mills and Boons

This is something I came across while browsing for online comic archives. And if you've read any Mills and Boons you know what I mean by the title. Anyways I was extremely amused on seeing this, didn't know that comic books like these (http://www.jennymiller.com/romancecomics/thecomics.html) existed.

Headlines

Read in the newspaper today - Vrindavan Gardens have been closed to visitors on account of flooding in the sorrounding areas and the Krishnaraj Sagar Dam being full to the brim. If you've been to Mysore you've probably been to the Vrindavan gardens and know that you have to cross this pathway over the dam to get to the gardens. I was thinking that if the dam gates are open the view from there should be amazing. This reminds of when I used to go to Kota Dam to see the water when they would open the gates during monsoons. Back home floods were comparatively harmless things. The maximum damage they would do was to leave a carpet of silt behind in all the rooms when the water receded. Besides all of us kids got the day off from school and spent it playing in knee deep water, a harmless and fun holiday. However yeah, it was a fairly nbd situation while the water was rising and if your house was built low at the street level, there could be more damage to stuff.

Coming back to newspaper, another headline which caught my attention today was novels through text messages. Methinks reading novels through SMS would be quite painful especially since I don't quite enjoy reading books on comp also. I'm also sure that if I had read the whole article I would have discovered that the idea is Japanese in origin.

The sports page today was full of stuff about today's India Srilanka match. One of the articles started with - 'India take the field today under Saurav Ganguly's shadow' which should make it easy to guess that it was TOI which I was reading. Wonder when they'll stop coming up with these clever headlines. One of the things I can't figure out is why I dislike Sanjay Manjrekar so much. Whenever he comes up for commentary I feel like turning the TV mute. A friend who was a huge fan of Jadeja, had once run into Manjrekar instead in London and played a game of tennis with him. True, this in no way helps to explain why I don't like him but then this blog is supposed to go nowhere.

Handwriting

Blogging ofcourse I've started this weekend itself, however before this I'd taken to writing stuff down in in writing pad for sometime. The following is a reproducion from there. (Yes yes, I was very bored and very jobless at home .. but I still didn't get my license made and now I'll probably suffer because of that :()

One of those things about me which is never going to change - my bad handwriting. Basically since I'm writing all this time the bad handwriting thing is more obvious or rather observable. and hence gives me something to ponder over. I tried various things in my school years as part of attempts to improve my handwriting. I think one of the very first tips I received was to apply a lot more pressure while writing. I guess it ensures better control or something. I was in upper KG at that time, so I s'pose it helped make my handwriting somewhat more legible atleast I remember a teacher telling me so. However over the years this habit of pressing the pen a little too hard on paper while writing has proved something of a liability - broken nibs, torn paper and so on.

Then somewhere down the line, I think in 6th standard, I started breaking my words and writing. I don't remember if it was somebody's suggestion or my own whim but I stuck with this for one year and then I started linking everything up again, not quite everything though, I still break a word or two after and I or an f. I also changed my word formation somewhat over the years. Everything used to be a lot more curlier when I was young, cursive handwriting style. So, I made my 'f's, 'h's, 'l's sharper and meaner. Oh unfortunately I can't show the difference here but I changed my 'm', 'B', 'b', 'G' etc. as well. However all this didn't really help to improve the overall sloppiness of my handwriting. Which brings me to the realization that my handwriting has always been sloppy. I might form individual alphabets alright, but while writing words my 't's get bent, 'e's nudge each other, alphabets become tall and short as suits their fancy, crooked, bent and generally falling over each other. Basically in one word 'sloppy'.

I wonder what a handwriting expert would have to say to this and also the fact that I realize this flaw and yet haven't corrected it. Some people insist that the inherent sloppiness of my handwriting is due to wrong grip of the pen. Very early in life I adapted my grip and my style of writing to ensure maximum speed. The thing is I think fast or rather I used to be able to come up with answers fast and I would be in a terrible hurry to put them down and move on to the next thing. I used to hate it if someone would finish their classwork (or homework) before me. I suppose hence the sacrifice of proper word formation for the sake of speed. Those who know me now would find it hard to believe that I did anything in a hurry.

Its true though, I hate taking too long over anything. Once I get started on something, I have to finish it asap, be it cleaning my room, writing a report, mugging for a quiz or an exam, or discussing important life-affecting matters, and I've often sacrificed being thorough and meticulous for the sake of speed. Infact I have a well earned reputation at home that any plans I make have to be changed eventually and often with some expense involved. That's mainly due to the fact that I'm never patient enough to wait a while and then decide. Patience brings me to how I get bored of most things pretty fast but that's for another time.

The three musketeers

This has been one of the most amazingly lazy weekends ever. If I don't go out to eat tonight then I would have successfully spent the entire weekend without climbing down from the fourth floor apartment, I'm currently staying in, more than once. That one time was for some urgent banking work and I did that fairly unwillingly as well. Although I didn't quite intend to spend it doing quite so much nothing, I had some very good plans of finishing the leftover packing required here and moving out on sunday so as to save me the trouble of doing so on a weekday, I am still quite happy with having spent the weekend in turns reading, watching TV (mostly cricket) and foraging for food. I don't say sleeping because I didn't do that to any unusual degree. I have spent each of the last three weekends in Bangalore more outdoors than inside, mostly watching some not too great movies (I am actually bored of doing that and have decided not to watch anymore until some really nice one comes up), which is why this weekend was a pleasant change.

So I'm reading 'The Three Musketeers' currently. Many people aren't very impressed with your reading if it is a classic you mention since obviously thats the stuff you read as kids. Anyways the thing is I never did so much reading as a kid, atleast not as much as I would have liked too, didn't have access to a great library etc. etc. So now I often tend to read stuff which I had heard of as a kid and wanted to read, hence my fascination with classics. In any case my reading tastes aren't very particular, I read pretty much anything and everything depending on what I can lay my hands on. Hm, anyways so its back to the match and the adventurous foursome for now. Actually I would want to talk abt how delicately things are put in these old books, one particular example in this book left me very amused but thats for another time.

Introduction

I think this procedure of creating a blog is uselessly complicated on blogspot.

I didn't know that you have to choose three different things - username, name of your blog and the .blogspot.com for the link to your blog. I wanted the link to be 'pocketsfullofposies.blogspot.com' (from the nursery rhyme ofcourse) , so I chose pocketsfullofposies as my username, however for some weird reason I couldn't set the username I had chosen as the name in the link. This led to the need to think of another name and eventually I settled on another nursery rhyme (since the word whim occurs in it and I had decided to call my blog Random pointless whimsical, yeah I often work with arguments like this :P).

Anyways I kind of like the new name better since this is an experiment in a way. I have absolutely no idea if I'll blog regularly or just give it up once I get bored (which is bound to happen, the question is how soon).